Two reporters, “obsessed with ridding the sports world of performance-enhancing drugs,” tried to discredit Alex Rodriguez’s attorney by getting a past client — former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik — to file a false ethics complaint against him, according to a $15 million defamation lawsuit.

Joseph Tacopina’s federal lawsuit, filed in Manhattan, says New York Daily News reporters Nathaniel Vinton and Michael O’Keeffe have slanted coverage in their crusade to persecute Rodriguez, and also wrote a “hit piece” on Tacopina. Kerik and others are also named in the legal action.

Tacopina says he became a target while defending the Yankees third baseman in his dispute with Major League Baseball, which suspended Rodriguez for 211 games for allegedly using banned substances and then trying to cover up evidence.

Don’t have need to have some character in the first place for someone to defame it?

Don’t have need to have some character in the first place for someone to defame it?

In Leon Uris’ novel QB VII, a Polish doctor pressed into service by the Nazis after they overrun Poland eventually winds up serving as the “head physician” at a concentration camp. After the war, he becomes an established doctor in England with a good reputation. A reporter exposes him for having performed surgical “experiments” without anesthesia on 15,000 victims while serving the Nazis. The doctor sues the reporter for damages, but the evidence gradually uncovers his crimes. Because the defendant can establish “only” 1000 such “surgeries”, he is found guilty by the court of a “minor exaggeration”. So the jury finds for the plaintiff, but in the amount of one half-penny, “the lowest coin in the realm”.

If the jury is convinced that Kerik’s claim is false, and that the reporters had a hand in the complaint filing, maybe they’ll find for Alex…in the sum of one penny.